A quiet notice V2Melody closes at midnight on , Spanish time.

Closes

A note from Richard

V2Melody will close at midnight on 20 January 2028

This site has been a retirement project in musical poetry: poems chosen with care and set to music, offered freely for as long as it felt right to keep the garden open.

The work no longer holds the place it once did in my life. I have gone as far with it as I wish to go. Like a sand mandala, it was made to be completed and then released. I am not attached to its permanence, and I do not believe any of it needs to last beyond the time it was given. The poems were already here before I arrived and began to experiment with them. They will still be here when these musical experiments, and indeed myself, have been swept away, like the sand of a mandala. Nothing has been lost.

I want a simpler end to my life, days of simple love and enjoyment with my wonderful wife of 20 years. The work of maintaining a server, the monitoring, and the residual obligations that come with keeping a site alive no longer fit that life.

From 4 November 2026 I will not be adding new poems or musical poems to the site.

Until midnight on 20 January 2028, Spanish time, everything remains available exactly as it is. That is when my VPS server contract comes to an end, and it will not be renewed. After that, the server will be switched off and the site will disappear.

The Mandala Is Finished explains this more fully.

Thank you to anyone who found a poem, a track, or a quiet moment here.

The pleasure was in the making.

Richard



Compare Poets

Pick two poets who seem to have nothing to do with each other — a Gothic American and a pastoral Englishman, say — and see where the catalogue actually joins them: overlapping years, shared ground, distinctive themes, and the poems that secretly rhyme.

Poet A

Francis Davison Francis Davison

Poet B

Ernest Dowson Ernest Dowson
Compare two related contemporaries

A random pair who overlapped in time and whose poems already rhyme in the catalogue — a way into poets you may not have met.

Kindred spirits
Their work already rhymes in the catalogue. The rest of this page is the story around that rhyme.
Biography 79% Blended 79%
Swap sides Another related pair
Francis Davison

Francis Davison

c. 1575 – c. 1619 (~44)
1 live poem · English

In the twilight of the Elizabethan era, when the English literary world shimmered with the brilliance of Shakespeare, Spenser, and Sidney, there moved a quieter, more introspective figure whose voice, though softer, carried the weight of genuine poetic sensibility — Francis Davison. Born in 1575, and passing into obscurity by 1619, Davison’s life spanned the final decades of Queen Elizabeth I’s reign and the early ye…

“The bee and spider, by a diverse power, Suck honey and poison from the selfsame flower.”

Neighbourhood: Elizabethan Poets, Love Poets, Renaissance Poets
Emotional landscape: Longing, Sorrow, Despair
Ernest Dowson

Ernest Dowson

2 August 1867 – 23 February 1900 (~33)
18 live poems · English

In the fading light of Victorian England, when the certainties of empire began to crack and a fin-de-siècle weariness settled over the literary world, Ernest Christopher Dowson emerged as one of the most hauntingly beautiful voices of his generation. His brief, tragic life—spanning a mere thirty-two years from 1867 to 1900—produced poetry of such delicate melancholy and exquisite craftsmanship that it continues to ca…

“This is a profound saying. Theism, Pantheism, Christianity, Positivism — they lie so close together that it is like splitting hairs to consider them apart. The vital issue is between optimism and pessimism.”

Neighbourhood: Death & Mortality, Decadent Poets, Symbolist Poets
Emotional landscape: Longing, Sorrow, Despair

In time

Francis Davison
Ernest Dowson
1575 1900
Their lives did not overlap. 248 years separate the earlier death from the later birth.

On the map

About 88 km separate London, England from Canterbury, Kent, England. Both have ground in England.

Themes they return to

Distinctive words drawn from each poet’s critiqued poems — what they keep writing about, not just what their biographies mention.

Shared

From the biographies

loss

Francis Davison: elizabethan era, william davison, a poetical rhapsody, ben jonson, michael drayton, westminster school, oxford, sonnet form. Ernest Dowson: lee, kent, rhymers' club, william butler yeats, adelaide foltinowicz, verses, non sum qualis eram bonae sub regno cynarae, vitae summa brevis spem nos vetat incohare longam, decadent movement.

Poems that secretly rhyme

The closest poem-to-poem matches in critique space — the sort of kinship a listener hears before the catalogue admits it.

Sweet, if you like and love me still
Francis Davison
76% love, beloved
Compare
De Amore
Ernest Dowson
Sweet, if you like and love me still
Francis Davison
74% love, beloved
Compare
In Tempore Senectutis
Ernest Dowson
Sweet, if you like and love me still
Francis Davison
73% love
Compare
To a Lost Love
Ernest Dowson
Sweet, if you like and love me still
Francis Davison
72%
Compare
Terre Promise
Ernest Dowson
Sweet, if you like and love me still
Francis Davison
72% love, beloved
Compare
Exchanges
Ernest Dowson

The world around them

Emotional landscapes

Francis Davison: Longing, Sorrow, Despair. Ernest Dowson: Longing, Sorrow, Despair.

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